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• • March 2, 2015 at 2:44 pm #73654
    whiskeytangofoxtrot

    Member

    I’ve imported a directory file created by an idiot. The firm name, address, phone, email, contact, etc., were EACH entered as a record in the Excel file I was provided. When placing in InDesign, I end up with a huge list of lines with no distinguishing “handle” to grab for formatting (bold, space before, font, etc.).
    In an attempt to start somewhere, I’ve ended all lines with a soft return. I’m now attempting a find/change, the FIND being “soft return, any digit” (\d). How do I “let go” of the “any digit” to simply CHANGE to hard return (\r)? Thank you for any help here!

  • March 2, 2015 at 3:06 pm #73656
    Colleen Shannon

    Member

    Find ^n
    Replace with ^p

    (I think that’s what you want?)

  • March 2, 2015 at 5:37 pm #73657
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Just a note on Colleen’s Find/Change query, that will only work in a Text search, in a GREP search you would Find: and Replace with \r. It does exactly the same thing, just in GREP.

  • March 2, 2015 at 7:21 pm #73658
    Colleen Shannon

    Member

    Thanks, A.A. I am not yet schooled in the ways of GREP.

  • March 2, 2015 at 8:14 pm #73659
    whiskeytangofoxtrot

    Member

    Thank you Colleen and AA. Problem is, ALL of the lines, regardless of desired format, now end with . I’m trying to key off of a particular string (i.e., phone area code in parens). I can get the string through FIND but I then want to “let go” of part of what I found for the CHANGE.

  • March 3, 2015 at 10:27 am #73671
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    So it sounds like there is a lot of soft returns and you are wanting to clean them up as well as convert soft hyphens to hard hyphens? That’s kinda what it sounds like you’re saying with wanting to ” ‘let go’ of part of what you found for the CHANGE”

    This will find all the soft returns (+) followed by any word character (\w), non-word character (\W), or digit (\d), while using a positive lookbehind (?<=), and replace the soft returns with a single hard return.

    Find: +(?<=\W|\w|\d)
    Change: \r

    Is that more along the lines of what you’re looking for?

  • March 3, 2015 at 3:07 pm #73684
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Oops, I used a lookbehind (?<=) in my previous post when I should have used a lookahead (?=)

    Find: +(?=\W|\w|\d)
    Change: \r

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